My heart pounded. No, Ava hadn’t had anything to do with the day before, I was sure of it. It wasn’t like the aphrodisiac Calliope had given us in Eden. Ava had known though. She’d known, and she hadn’t done a damn thing to stop it.

“I couldn’t tell you were pregnant until you got up here,” said Ava. “I’m so sorry. I would have never—”

“But I’m not,” I said, bewildered. “I can’t be. We only just—”

“All you had to do was sleep with Henry,” said Calliope.

“I did the rest.”

She twitched her f inger, and I fell to my knees in the snow. The thing she’d done to me, I realized, horrif ied.

The goddess of marriage and women. And fertility.

This had been her plan all along.

“I told you that I would take from you what you loved the most,” said Calliope, and a large black rock appeared in her hand. It was the same kind of rock that had been in the cavern, and fog swirled inside it. She giggled. “What, did you think I meant Henry?”

A wave of nausea swept over me. “Please,” I whispered.

Her eyes narrowed, and I knew it was hopeless.

“You did this to yourself,” she said. “And your child.

Payback’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

With that, she cracked the stone against the back of my head, and my world went black.